Human Nature: the top ten

Kevin Drum is looking for a “Human Nature Top Ten” — well-established but underappreciated aspects of human psychology that illuminate behavior. His opening gambits are loss aversion and regression to the mean. I’d add adaptation effects, e.g. the hedonic treadmill: people adapt to changes in levels of (many) goods so that over time the additional good adds nothing to their levels of satisfaction. However, people tend to underestimate the strength of these effects on themselves and others. (E.g. Midwestern college students think that West Coast college students are happier because the weather is nicer; people think they’d be miserable in prison or in a wheelchair.)

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20 comments

Great quantities of the discipline of economics are built on the foundation of “rational expectations,” as if this were a reliable predictor of human behavior. And many economists are irrational enough to actually believe it.

I was going to say that magical thinking is another example, but it could be that the former is merely a special case of the latter.

Economics needs to be less informed by elegant models and more informed by messy human psychology.

The inability to intuitively understand why your odds of winning Let’s Make a Deal are better if you switch which door you picked after Monty shows you one of the joke-prizes comes to mind as a common (possibly near universal) human failing, but I doubt this should make a top-10 since the scenario isn’t that common in regular life.

There are almost certainly other (better) things along this line where human intuition is simply wrong compared to the mathematics or statistics of a situation.

Following Herbert Browne, I think the top ten list should include the human species’ deep need to anthropomorphize that which they can’t yet explain otherwise, and then build upon this fictional foundation amazingly elaborate cultural, psychological, and philosophical systems. Humans then reify their fictional deities, mold them into clubs and swords, and beat one another to death with them.

No other animal does this, that we know of — male chimpanzees kill one another for territory, females, etc., but they don’t seem to do it for Yahweh/Jehovah/Allah/etc.

No other animal does this, that we know of — male chimpanzees kill one another for territory, females, etc., but they don’t seem to do it for Yahweh/Jehovah/Allah/etc.
I’m not sure what the proper psychological term for this would be.

The “fundamental error of attribution” is biased by cultural background (according to the article you cite). Is it fundamental, then?

Regardless, I think that this notion is indirectly related to my idea above that we hate liars and forgive bullshitters. The liar actually has the attribute of trying to deceive us and the bullshitter might or might not have that attribute–and we probably make the error that he doesn’t have the attribute of deception.